A conventional toilet tissue roll is comprised of a core made of paperboard or the like about which are wound convolutions of the tissue. The rolls are typically dispensed by unwinding the tissue until the tissue is depleted and the core remains to be discarded.
It is also known to provide coreless tissue and other paper products wherein the product is wound directly onto a mandrel and not onto a permanent core when being formed. The finished product, in other words, has no core and nothing is left to discard once the roll has been unwound and used by a consumer.
A wide variety of dispensers have been devised over the years for dispensing tissue from rolls, principally rolls having cores. The prior art dispensers can dispense from either single or multiple rolls and arrangements are known for allowing for the sequential dispensing of tissue and the like from multiple rolls. Insofar as multiple roll dispensing is concerned, it is known to employ a cabinet having a dispensing opening and incorporating a mechanism which will present rolls for dispensing automatically or semiautomatically in response to depletion of one of the rolls. Most such mechanisms are specifically for use with rolls having cores.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,387,902, issued Jun. 11, 1968, discloses a dispenser for sequentially presenting rolls of tissue and the like for dispensing purposes, the rolls having cores which are split into segments. The rolls are mounted on roll holders projecting from a frame. The frame is slidably mounted in a housing. Depletion of a roll will result in actuation of a mechanism which will cause the frame to slide relative to the housing and present another tissue roll having a split core in a dispensing position.
The arrangement disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,387,902 is inappropriate for use with coreless tissue rolls. For example, the roll holder structure disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,387,902 will not and cannot fit within the confines of a coreless tissue roll central aperture which typically is quite constricted in nature.
A search of the prior art also located the following United States patents relating to dispensing from single or multiple rolls of paper tissue and the like: U.S. Pat. No. 4,497,453, issued Feb. 5, 1985, U.S. Pat. No. 3,771,739, issued Nov. 13, 1973, U.S. Pat. No. 4,340,195, issued Jul. 20, 1982, U.S. Pat. No. 3,770,222, issued Nov. 6, 1973, U.S. Pat. No. 4,143,827, issued Mar. 13, 1979, U.S. Pat. No. 3,523,653, issued Aug. 11, 1970, U.S. Pat. No. 4,071,200, issued Jan. 31, 1978, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,211,504, issued Oct. 12, 1965. Those arrangements which allow sequential dispensing from multiple rolls are for the most part inapplicable and inappropriate insofar as dispensing from coreless rolls is concerned.